Wednesday, 5 December 2018

In the depths of Edinburgh, an evil presence is released.
Hannah and her colleagues are tour guides who lead their visitors along
the spooky, derelict Henderson Close, thrilling them with tales of
spectres and murder. For Hannah it is her dream job, but not for long.

Who is the mysterious figure that disappears around a corner? What is
happening in the old print shop? And who is the little girl with no
face?
The legends of Henderson Close are becoming all too real.

Tuesday, 13 November 2018

I first ran the story of these two notorious women around six years ago but, in the light of something I have been working on, their names cropped up again. Here is their gruesome tale:Two
sisters living in a rundown part of Liverpool decided on an easy way of
improving their meagre circumstances - and paid with their lives.

In
1881, Thomas Higgins took his wife and ten year old daughter to take
lodgings in the house of Catherine Flanagan who, along with her recently
widowed sister, Margaret, lived at 5 Skirving Street in the Vauxhall
area of the city. In doing so, Thomas had unwittingly signed the death
warrants of his wife, child and, ultimately, himself.

(Catherine Flanagan)

Not long after they moved in, his
wife died, and he must have sought solace in the arms of Margaret, for,
on 28th October, 1882, the couple married. By the end of the following
month, Thomas's daughter had joined her mother. On 22 October 1883,
having recently increased his life insurance cover, Thomas died,
apparently from dysentery, not uncommon in those days of poor sanitation
and public health.

But
Thomas's brother Patrick, believed something much more sinister was
going on and contacted the doctor who had signed the death certificate
with his suspicions. The coroner was alerted and Thomas's body was
exhumed and examined. No trace of the disease was found and arsenic was
proved to be the cause of death. Amazingly, this deadly poison could be
found in most homes in those days - as one of the constituent
ingredients of flypapers.

Motive? Simple. Money. Thomas was worth far more to the sisters dead than alive.

Following
this gruesome discovery, three more bodies were exhumed. All had died
recently, all had life insurance, and all had resided with the sisters.
Catherine's own son, John, had netted his mother £71, a young female
lodger had added £79 and Thomas's little daughter had returned a quick
profit of nearly £22. Not inconsiderable sums in the 1880s. Post mortems
revealed that every single one of them had died from arsenic poisoning.

Catherine
Flanagan and Margaret Higgins were hanged on 3rd March 1884 for the
four murders, but this may only have been the tip of the iceberg. It was
found that four other women were involved in the scam (although not
convicted of any involvement in the poisonings) and there may have been
as many as seventeen victims.

The moral of this gruesome tale? Life insurance may not be good for your health!

Gabriele Ziegler is a young art student who becomes infatuated with charismatic archeologist Dr. Emeryk Quintillus. Only too late does she realize his true designs on her. He is obsessed with resurrecting Cleopatra and has retained the famed artist Gustav Klimt to render Gabriele as the Queen of the Nile, using ashes from Cleopatra’s mummy mixed with the paint. The result is a lifelike portrait emitting an aura of unholy evil . . .

Vienna, 2018

The Mortimer family has moved into Quintillus’s former home, Villa Dürnstein. In its basement they find an original Klimt masterpiece—a portrait of Cleopatra art scholars never knew existed. But that’s not all that resides within the villa’s vault. Nine-year-old Heidi Mortimer tells her parents that a strange man lives there.

Quintillus’s desire to be with Cleopatra transcends death. His spirit will not rest until he has brought her back from the netherworld. Even if he has to sacrifice the soul of a child . . .

Tuesday, 23 October 2018

In my novel, Damned by the Ancients, a child’s doll becomes possessed and,
indeed there are many well documented cases of toys and furniture seeming to
have been appropriated by dark forces.

However, now, it seems the devil
has taken to using technology to get his message across. Yes, really! Take this
strange case in Poland.

In 2014, priest Marian Rajchel
carried out an exorcism on a teenage girl. It failed. Instead of leaving her soul,
he somehow managed to drive the demon into the girl’s mobile phone whereupon he
started to receive threatening text messages from it.

He replied and received the
response, “Shut up, Preacher. You cannot save yourself. Idiot. You pathetic old
preacher.” Even more sinister, one message said, “She will not come out of
hell. She’s mine. Anyone who prays for her will die.”

Father
Rajchel is convinced the author of the text messages is the same demon that
possesses the girl’s soul and, furthermore, asserts that this is no isolated
incident. He believes many such cases like this are going undetected because
people don’t realise they are being used in this way.

He
has gone on record saying that the young girl is in need of further help to rid
her of the evil inhabiting her.

But
Father Rajchel is not alone in his belief that the devil is working through
technology. In Savannah, Georgia, Reverend Jim Peasboro has written a book
entitled, The Devil in the machine; Is Your
Computer Possessed by a Demon? In his view, any computer built after 1985
has the memory capacity to house a demon. He believes ‘one in ten computers in
America now houses some type of evil spirit.” He quotes as evidence for this,
many instances of formerly happily married men unable to stop themselves from
visiting pornographic websites and of women drawn into internet chat rooms
where they behaved totally out of character, using foul language and debasing
themselves in a way that would hitherto have been abhorrent to them. One such
woman wept as she told of feeling that whenever she was using her computer,
someone else was controlling her actions.

When
challenged that this is simply the result of the easy availability of so much unsavoury
– and worse – material on the internet, Reverend Peasboro insisted that he knew
for certain demons were at work – because he had come face to face with them.

He
told a story of inspecting a computer believed to be possessed by an evil
spirit when it began openly ‘talking’ to him. It typed out, “Preacher, you are
a weakling and your God is a damn liar.” It then started to go berserk and
printed out what looked like nonsense. He then consulted an expert in dead
languages who studied it and reported back that the text contained a stream of
obscenities written in a 2800 year old Mesopotamian dialect.

So,
what do you do if you suspect your usually friendly PC or tablet starts
behaving in a disturbing fashion? According to Reverend Peasboro you should contact
a member of the clergy for help and, if that doesn’t work, call a computer
technician who will change the hard drive and reinstall all the software. This,
he assures us, will get rid of the spirit permanently.

If
only things were so simple for the Mortimer family. But Dr. Emeryk Quintillus
isn’t going to go quietly… Here’s what to expect in Damned by the Ancients;

INFINITY IN DEATH

Vienna, 1908

Gabriele Ziegler is a young art student who becomes infatuated with charismatic
archeologist Dr. Emeryk Quintillus. Only too late does she realize his true
designs on her. He is obsessed with resurrecting Cleopatra and has retained the
famed artist Gustav Klimt to render Gabriele as the Queen of the Nile, using
ashes from Cleopatra’s mummy mixed with the paint. The result is a lifelike
portrait emitting an aura of unholy evil . . .

Vienna, 2018

The Mortimer family has moved into Quintillus’s former home, Villa Dürnstein.
In its basement they find an original Klimt masterpiece—a portrait of Cleopatra
art scholars never knew existed. But that’s not all that resides within the
villa’s vault. Nine-year-old Heidi Mortimer tells her parents that a strange
man lives there.

Quintillus’s desire to be with Cleopatra transcends death. His spirit will not
rest until he has brought her back from the netherworld. Even if he has to
sacrifice the soul of a child . . .

Wednesday, 17 October 2018

My guest today is historical author Shehanne Moore. I love her books, which combine adventure with feisty characters, humour and a flavour of the Gothic:

"As
God is my witness, this property shall ne’er be inherited by two direct
successors, for its sons will be hounded by misfortune."

By
Shehanne Moore.

As God is mine I must say I was heartily glad to read the
following….

‘Berkshire is a place of mystery, myth and legend. The
county abounds with strange tales of ghostly phantoms, ferocious creatures,
kings & knights, witchcraft, treasure and more.’

Why was I glad? Because it’s never easy coming to the
wonderfully chilling blog of Gothic horror writer, Catherine Cavendish.
Certainly NOT when you write romance,
even when it's slightly Gothic romance.
Thank you so very much Cat for inviting me. despite this.

Not only is my recently re-released book Loving Lady
Lazuli set in Berkshire - phew-there was a ton of tales to choose from.

So it said online anyway which was why I was initially
drawn to the ‘most haunted’ Shaw House but the most interesting thing there I
could find was the true story of how the Duke of Chandos took as his wife, a
beautiful chambermaid who was being sold off by her husband in an inn yard with
a halter round her neck.

Not just shades of Thomas Hardy’s, The Mayor of
Casterbridge but proof that the business of dukes marrying what might be
construed as women who were well below their social status….as happens in
Lazuli and indeed in a lot of historical romance… is not as daft as all that.

Moving on though, through covens of witches and headless
men, I came to the story of Bisham Abbey...I guess apposite again as Barwych
Hall in the book is based on Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire. However, the Bisham monks were so furious at
Henry VIII for ‘dissolving them,’ they cursed the ancient building.

And indeed…as in another follow through from the book,
sort of anyway…the sons of Bisham’s many different owners didn’t just fall down
dead, they were beheaded, they died young, they were killed in world wars—and,
as in the case of young William Hoby, they had some help from their mother. In
this case, the widowed Lady Elizabeth who had such high standards of education, she not only beat young William to bits and
locked him in the Tower Room to do his lessons all over again, she quite forgot,
despite being so brilliant herself, that she’d done it, clearing off to Windsor
for several days of dancing and banqueting. A very merry widow to all accounts.
After all, weren’t there servants for
tiresome things like children after all?

At least Lady Elizabeth thought so, so she was really
quite astonished on returning home to find that everyone thought William was
with her….

I think we all know what’s coming next.

But did William exist at all? There’s documented evidence
for Anne, the Chandos' chambermaid bride. But William?

Well, firstly the fact that there’s no genealogical
evidence to show he did exist, doesn’t always mean a thing. Not all records
survive. And the Hobys had other estates
where his birth could have been recorded.

"Proof" of William’s existence is sort of provided
by the discovery in 1840, during renovations, of copy books containing blots on
every page, corrections by the ‘wicked lady‘ herself and the name, William Hoby.
Alas, I say ‘sort of’ because these copy books sort of then disappeared. Maybe
Lady Hoby stole them...? a bit like my jewel thieves in the book.

However 1840 was the point where the son first became
known as William. Till then he’d just been a nameless son, like you get these
nameless, headless horsemen. Lady Hoby did indeed have a son…Francis…who died
young in unknown circumstances, at the time she had remarried and her surname
was then Russell.

You pays your money you takes your chances, I’d say on
truth and legend mixing to become one…or the other.

Whether or not Lady Hoby caused her son’s death as said, the Abbey is known to be one of the most haunted
houses in Britain, certainly the most haunted in Berkshire and that haunting is
done by her apparently grief-stricken
self, dressed in black lace and white,
washing her hands a la Lady Macbeth. She tears curtains, throws things. But
mostly she just sobs and leaves lights up in the Tower Room. Some people think
she causes the mists that wreath the Abbey and until 1936 she especially liked
to come out for coronations.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little venture to the darker
side and won’t be afraid to visit the Abbey…

Talking ghosts… here’s the blurb for Loving Lady Lazuli.

A woman not even the
ghost of Sapphire can haunt. A man who knows exactly who she is.

Only one man in
England can identify her. Unfortunately he’s living next door.

Ten years ago sixteen year old Sapphire, the greatest jewel
thief England has ever known, ruined Lord Devorlane Hawley’s life by planting a
stolen necklace on him. Now she’s dead and
buried, all Cassidy Armstrong wants is the chance to prove she was never that
girl.

But her new neighbor is hell-bent on revenge and his word
can bring her down. So when he asks her to be his mistress, or leave the county
with a price on her head, Sapphire, who hates being owned, must decide...

What’s left for a
woman with nowhere else to go, but to stay exactly where she is?

And hope, that when it comes to neighbors Devorlane Hawley
won’t prove to be the one from hell.

When not cuddling inn signs in her beloved Scottish
mountains alongside Mr Shey, Shehanne Moore writes dark and smexy historical
romance, featuring bad boys who need a bad girl to sort them out. She firmly
believes everyone deserves a little love, forgiveness and a second chance in
life.

Shehanne caused general apoplexy when she penned her first
story, The Hore House Mystery—aged seven. From there she progressed to writing
plays for her classmates, stories for
her classmates, plays for real, comic book libraries for girls, various
newspaper articles, ghost writing,
nonfiction writing, and magazine editing.
Stories for real were what she really
wanted to write though and, having met with every rejection going, she sat down
one day to write a romance, her way.